The short version: Influencer marketing didn’t start with Instagram, it started in 1760 when a potter got the Queen of England to use his teapots. What we call influencer marketing today is really the fourth or fifth version of the same idea: borrow someone else’s trust to sell your thing. The tools changed, the maths changed, but the mechanic is 260 years old.
The teapot that started it all
In 1765, Josiah Wedgwood made a tea set for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. She liked it enough to let him call himself “Potter to Her Majesty” and rename the design “Queen’s Ware.” Wedgwood then plastered that royal connection across his catalogues and shop windows. Sales took off. He wasn’t paying her, and there was no contract, but he was doing exactly what a brand does when it sends free product to a creator today: attaching his goods to someone people already trusted, hoping it would rub off.
That is the first documented case historians point to when they trace where influencer marketing started, and it matters because it proves the strategy predates every platform by centuries. Radio and film stars did the same thing in the 1930s and 40s (cigarette brands used doctors in adverts, which sounds mad now but was standard practice until the 1950s). Nike signed Michael Jordan in 1984 and built an entire shoe empire on borrowed credibility before anyone had said the word “influencer” out loud.
The blog era: 2004 to 2009
The modern version starts with blogging, not social media. Between 2004 and 2009, mummy bloggers, fashion bloggers and tech bloggers built loyal readerships in the tens of thousands, and brands noticed they could get more genuine engagement from a niche blog than from a banner ad nobody clicked. I was in the middle of this. I started blogging in 2008 and by 2011 I’d been named one of Forbes’s top social media influencers, back when that list meant something because so few people were doing it. Brands would send free product with no brief at all, just a polite note asking if I’d mention it “if I liked it.” No contracts, no usage rights, no FTC disclosure requirement in the UK. It was the wild west, and it worked because it was rare.
PayPerPost launched in 2006 and let bloggers get paid per sponsored post, which was the first real marketplace for what we’d now call influencer marketing. It got a bad reputation fast because a lot of bloggers took the money and wrote glowing reviews for products they’d never tested. That trust problem never fully went away, it just moved platforms.
Instagram, YouTube and the boom years: 2010 to 2016
Instagram launched in October 2010. YouTube had already opened its Partner Program in 2007, letting creators earn ad revenue directly, which turned “having a channel” into an actual job for people like Zoella and PewDiePie by 2012. This is the period where influencer marketing stopped being a favour system between bloggers and PR teams and became a proper industry with rate cards, agencies and negotiated deals.
Klout scores were a big part of this too, and worth remembering because almost nobody talks about them anymore: a single number from 1 to 100 that supposedly measured your online influence, and brands used it to decide who got free hotel stays or product hauls. It was flawed, gameable and eventually shut down in 2018, but for a few years it was treated like gospel. I remember watching brands pick influencers off a Klout leaderboard with zero regard for whether that person’s audience bought anything. That disconnect between “influence” and “sales” is the same problem the industry is still fighting now, just with follower counts instead of Klout scores.
By 2016, the influencer marketing industry was worth an estimated 1.7 billion dollars globally, according to Influencer Marketing Hub’s benchmark reports, which is a useful anchor point because it shows how small this was before it exploded.
The regulation era: 2017 onward
2017 is the year everything got more serious. The US Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to over 90 celebrities and brands for undisclosed sponsored posts, and the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority followed with its own crackdown on hidden ads on Instagram. Hashtags like #ad and #sponsored stopped being optional and started being a legal requirement. I wrote about this shift at the time because it changed how every brand I worked with briefed a campaign, and looking back at what I covered in social media marketing in 2017, disclosure and platform algorithm changes were already the two biggest headaches for anyone doing this seriously.
This is also when brands started treating influencer content the way they’d always treated employee content: as something with commercial weight that needed rules around it. If you’ve ever set up a formal employee advocacy program, you’ll recognise the shape of what happened to influencer marketing here. It stopped being informal enthusiasm and became a managed channel with guidelines, approval steps and legal sign-off.
TikTok and the creator economy: 2018 to 2022
TikTok launched globally in 2018 (as the merger of Musical.ly) and by 2020 it had reshaped the entire industry’s expectations around speed and authenticity. Suddenly a 19-year-old with no agent and a ring light could out-perform a celebrity with 10 million Instagram followers, because TikTok’s algorithm rewarded watch time over follower count. This is the point where “influencer marketing” quietly rebranded itself as “the creator economy,” a bigger, more organised version of the same idea, complete with talent agencies, MCNs (multi-channel networks), and creator funds paying out directly from the platforms themselves.
Goldman Sachs Research estimated the creator economy at roughly 250 billion dollars in 2023, projecting it could nearly double to 480 billion dollars by 2027. That is not a niche marketing tactic anymore, that is a parallel economy running alongside traditional retail and media, and it’s why fashion and beauty brands now build entire go-to-market plans around creators before they even think about a traditional ad buy. If you’re building out a full marketing strategy for a clothing business in 2026, creator partnerships aren’t a bolt-on anymore, they’re usually the first channel, not the last.
Where things sit in 2026, and the uncomfortable bit nobody likes saying out loud
Here’s the part most retrospectives skip over: influencer marketing in 2026 looks a lot more like traditional advertising than the word-of-mouth revolution it was sold as. Engagement rates on Instagram have dropped year after year since 2016 as feeds got more crowded, and a huge chunk of what still gets sold as “authentic recommendation” is now whitelisted ad content, meaning the brand runs the post through the creator’s account as a paid ad targeting people who’ve never even followed them. The audience thinks they’re seeing an organic post from someone they trust. They’re seeing a media buy.
Fraud never went away either. Multiple studies, including reporting from the Association of National Advertisers, have found that fake followers and bot engagement still cost brands hundreds of millions of dollars a year in wasted spend. Brands that don’t check engagement quality against follower count, or run basic fraud detection before paying an invoice, are still getting caught out exactly the way they were in 2015. The “just find someone with a big following” approach was oversold for a decade and it’s finally dying, replaced by brands paying smaller fees to fewer, better-vetted creators with proper usage rights and measurable conversion tracking, which is the same conversion-first thinking I’ve walked through in the conversion rate optimisation webinar I did for Simplilearn: traffic and reach mean nothing without a tracked path to a sale.
A quick step-by-step of how the industry changed
- 1765: Wedgwood uses royal endorsement to sell pottery, the first documented borrowed-trust marketing
- 1930s to 1950s: celebrities and even doctors endorse products in print and radio ads
- 2004 to 2006: blogging matures, PayPerPost launches the first paid sponsored content marketplace
- 2007: YouTube Partner Program lets creators earn direct ad revenue
- 2010: Instagram launches, visual influencers become a distinct category
- 2012 to 2014: Klout scores and follower counts become the currency brands chase
- 2016: global industry valued at 1.7 billion dollars
- 2017: FTC and ASA crackdowns force disclosure, #ad becomes standard
- 2018: TikTok launches globally, algorithm-driven reach replaces follower-count-driven reach
- 2023 to 2026: creator economy passes 250 billion dollars, whitelisting and AI-generated virtual influencers become mainstream, deinfluencing pushes back against overconsumption
What this history tells you if you’re running a brand
The mechanic hasn’t changed since Wedgwood: borrow trust, don’t fake it. Every era that got sloppy about that (the PayPerPost scandal, the Klout obsession, the follower-buying years) got punished with a trust collapse and regulation. Every era that respected it (real product testing, real disclosure, real audience fit) built brands that lasted. If you’re deciding where to put your budget in 2026, the honest lesson from 260 years of this is boring but true: pick people whose audience already wants what you sell, pay them, disclose the deal, and track the actual sale rather than the like count.
Related reading: did twitter change.
Frequently asked questions
When did influencer marketing officially start?
There’s no single official start date, but historians point to 1765, when potter Josiah Wedgwood used Queen Charlotte’s endorsement to sell his “Queen’s Ware” pottery, as the first documented case of borrowed-trust marketing. The modern digital version most people mean when they say “influencer marketing” started with blogging around 2004 to 2006 and matured into an industry once Instagram launched in 2010.
Who is considered the first influencer?
Josiah Wedgwood’s royal endorsement in the 1760s is the earliest well-documented example, though celebrities and even doctors were used in print and radio adverts throughout the early 1900s. In the digital sense, early 2000s bloggers and 2005 to 2010 YouTube creators are usually credited as the first influencers as we understand the term today.
How big is the influencer marketing industry now?
The influencer marketing industry was valued at roughly 1.7 billion dollars in 2016 and has since become part of a much larger creator economy, which Goldman Sachs Research estimated at around 250 billion dollars in 2023 with projections toward 480 billion dollars by 2027.
Is influencer marketing still effective in 2026?
Yes, but it works differently than it did a decade ago. Engagement rates have dropped since the early Instagram boom, and much of what looks like organic influencer content is now paid whitelisted advertising. Brands that vet creators, pay for real audience fit rather than follower count, and track conversions rather than likes are still getting strong returns.
